[1] Twelve weeks ago I set a goal for myself for the summer. I wanted to take that little bit of schedule change in summer and give that time back to the Lord. My goal was to memorize the whole book of James, but I’m just now starting on chapter 2.

At first when the 12 weeks were up I thought, “What went wrong? Was I too ambitious?” But it seems foolish to only set goals I know I can achieve. Kind of like putting things you’ve already done on your “To-Do” list just to have something you can check off.

This weekend I’ve been asking other people how their goal went this summer and that helped me figure out the problem. It isn’t that we’re just lazy wasting hours in front of the TV or sleeping in till noon everyday. It’s not even that we don’t know that our goals were important and good things to do. Looking back I can see that the main reason I neglected my goal was due mostly to lack of discipline. I realize now that if I needed to have a plan to do a certain number of verses each week and then have someone ask me each week to tell them the passage I had been working on. With discipline and accountability I could have made more progress.

I’m disappointed that I didn’t finish the whole book of James because I have benefited so much from having the first chapter committed to memory. But even though I didn’t meet my goal this was a valuable lesson for me. We shouldn’t lower the expectations, but work more specifically with discipline toward those expectations.

I can see this same dynamic in the Christian life. We see huge expectations in Scripture that would translate into some challenging goals. We try to go after them, but when we don’t meet them, too often we lower our expectation to something more doable. But instead of lowering the goals to where we are, we need to push ourselves through discipline and accountability to attain the goals that the Lord has set for us.
2 Corinthians 5 gives us great perspective on this–

Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. We live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.

2 Corinthians 5:6-10

This passage makes it clear that as Christians our goal is to please Christ. This needs to be our ambition in everything we do. To be honest we fall short of this goal all the time just like I did with my summer challenge. The question now is are we going to lower our goals or work harder to be disciplined. I hope you’ll join me with a renewed motivation to go after those goals, making it our aim to please Christ!